Young Muslims begin dangerous fight
for the right to abandon faith

David Charter in The Hague

[COMMENT: YES! YES!
YES! This is one of the most exciting and positive turns in
the Islamic story that I have seen, young men willing to risk their lives for
their freedom to choose their own religion. This may be the beginning of a
serious reformation in Islam. If they stand firm, many more will follow.

Christians and truth-seekers
everywhere MUST stand with these people. They are affirming the
first level of honest community life -- the right to freely pursue the truth -
with respect for others doing the same. That is the very basis of the
American Constitution. Such freedom can be sustained only if one's view of
God sustains it. No religion outside the Bible does so.

Ehsan
Jami rejected Islam after the 9
11 terror attacks. He wants
Muslims to be able to give up
their religion

A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce
Islam.

The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and
a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance.

The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion
but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring
tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands.

Ehsan Jami, the committee’s founder, who rejected Islam after the attack
on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure
in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death
threats and a recent attack.

The threats are taken seriously after the murder in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn,
an antiimmigration politician, and in 2004 of Theo Van Gogh, an antiIslam
film-maker.

Speaking to The Times at a secret location before the committee’s launch
today, the Labour Party councillor said that the movement would declare war
on radical Islam. Similar organisations campaigning for reform of the
religion have sprung up across Europe and representatives from Britain and
Germany will join the launch in The Hague today.

“Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the
West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up,” Mr Jami
said. “In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We
want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be
and what they want to believe in.”

Mr Jami, 22, who has abandoned his studies as his political career has
taken off, denied that the choice of September 11 was deliberately
provocative towards the Islamic Establishment. “We chose the date because we
want to make a clear statement that we no longer tolerate the intolerence of
Islam, the terrorist attacks,” he said.

“In 1965 the Church in Holland made a declaration that freedom of
conscience is above hanging on to religion, so you can choose whether you
are going to be a Christian or not. What we are seeking is the same thing
for Islam.”

Mr Jami, who has compared the rise of radical Islam to the threat from
Nazism in the 1930s, is receiving only lukewarm support from his party which
traditionally relies upon Muslim votes. His outspoken attack on radical
Islam has led to a prelaunch walk-out from fellow committee founder Loubna
Berrada, who herself rejected Islam.

She said: “I don’t wish to confront Islam itself. I only want to spread
the message that Muslims should be allowed to leave Islam behind without
being threatened.”

There have been suggestions that Mr Jami might defect to the right-wing
Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, the most outspoken politician in the
Netherlands, who has called for the Koran to be banned. But Mr Jami said: “I
have respect for Wilders but we do not have the same ideology. I am for the
freedom of religion.

“Banning something is not going to help. I am the opposite – everyone
should read the Koran.” Mr Jami is being compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the
Somali refugee who became a prominent Dutch politician campaigning for the
reform of Islam but who left eventually for an academic career in the United
States.

Jannie Groen, a writer for De Volksrant newspaper, said: “[Among Muslims]
he is getting the same reaction as Ayaan Hirsi Ali that he is too
confrontational but you are seeing other former Muslims now coming forward.
So he has been able to put this issue of apostasy on the agenda, even though
they do not want to be in the same room as him and he has had to pay a
price.”

By the Book

— 14 passages in the Koran refer to apostasy

— According to Baidhawi’s commentary, Sura 4: 88-89 reads: “Whosoever
turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him
wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him
altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard.”

— The hadith, tradition and legend about Muhammad and his followers used
as a basis of Sharia, tells of some atheists who were brought to “’Ali and
he burnt them. The news of this reached Ibn Abbas who said: ‘If I had been
in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah’s Apostate forbade it .
. . I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah’s Apostate,
‘Whoever changed his [Islamic] religion, then kill him’.”

— According to hadith, a special reward in Paradise is reserved for the
killer of apostates

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